I had a few minutes to kill at my local Fedex-Kinkos today while waiting for some passport photos and I thought I’d browse the wares. I was in an all-too-familiar situation of hope over experience. I have an inexplicable belief that, no matter what, I will discover something of interest in a copy shop. I browsed racks of padded envelopes thinking about the the junk I needed to sell on eBay. After a few minutes I inspected different boxes of paper, seeing if I can finally learn the difference between “Bond” Ledger Mimeo Duplicator Rag and “Offset” Book Text Coated (No one can). I was well into checking the math of Imperial-Metric weight conversion on a roll of packing tape when I spotted the bookshelf.
I ran to it like a man dying of thirst. Here, finally, was a chance to peer into the mind of the Kinkos target demographic. The books on the narrow rack fell into three categories: get rich quick, self-help books, and how-to’s on dealing with irrational coworkers. My eyes first fell on “The Insider’s Guide to Making Money in Real Estate; an ill-timed edition to be sure. Next to that was a lone copy of Working with You Is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself from Emotional Traps at Work, a guide to surviving crazy bosses. Hidden around the back was the dangerously optimistic Developing the Leader Within You. The rest were all about improving yourself and the emotional and/or financial state common to the soul-crushing life.
What struck me most about the books was that they just seemed to be randomly placed there; as if this little oasis of self-help in the sterile gray speckle carpeted desert of productivity had come about organically. There weren’t more than two copies of any book and most of them were well-worn. It was as if some psychological victim of the corporate life had sneaked in here and surreptitiously installed a book swap center, a little ray of sunshine in the crippling monotony of the dull-fluorescent, dry walled life. But who could get in here unless he had a key?
I was absorbed in the image of the stealthy, stifled corporate revolutionary when the Fedex-Kinkos worker at the counter snapped me out of my reverie. My pictures, required for my application to graduate school in Cairo, were ready.
“Here you go,” he said, handing them to me in the glossy faux-passport.
“But I still need to pay,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, and walked away.
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